Seagate 2TB Hard Drive not responding, stops programs from working

Hi

By looking at the fdisk output, it seems that sdd is without any partitions and sdc is with a single NTFS partition. So i think sdc is your failing drive. But i see another potential issue - sdc is reporting 4096 bytes physical and logical sector size but sdd is a 512 byte sector sized disk. sdc reports 488378645 total sectors and sdd reports 3907029164 total sectors. It is not possible to directly clone your failing disk to the source disk as they are different in physical aspects. I think using "Photorec" and rescuing as much as data to the new disk is the only practical way in your case.

To make sure which one is which, connect only the failing disk at first and run fdisk. Note the sector size and total number of sectors it reports. Then disconnect the failing disk and only connect the new one - repeat the fdisk step.

Usually it should be the new disk which should have 4096 byte sized sectors. The lack of partition on "sdd" is what confusing me. If you can post screenshots, it will be better to identify the disks.

Okay.

The new disk has 4096 byte sized sectors.

The old faulty disk has 512 byte sized sectors.

Anshad Edavana said:

Hi

By looking at the fdisk output, it seems that sdd is without any partitions and sdc is with a single NTFS partition. SO sdc is your failing drive. But i see another potential issue - sdc is reporting 4096 bytes physical and logical sector size but sdd is a 512 byte sector sized disk. sdc reports 488378645 total sectors and sdd reports 3907029164 total sectors. It is not possible to directly clone your failing disk to the source disk as they are different in physical aspects. I think using "Photorec" and rescuing as much as data to the new disk is the only practical way in your case.

I see. That is unfortunate. I've already done a completed Photorec recover of the faulty drive.

I think the sdc (4096 sector size/488378645 total sectors) must have become faulty after I began the ddrescue on it but then halted progress before completion.

I think the sdc (4096 sector size/488378645 total sectors) must have become faulty after I began the ddrescue on it but then halted progress before completion.

I don't think the new one is faulty. Cloning 512 byte sector sized disk to 4096 sector sized disk will cause the target disk's file system to be destroyed.

I have a plan.

1. Connect the new HDD to a Windows machine and use "Partition Wizard" to delete any existing partition and create a single NTFS partition spanning from start to end.

2. Connect both old and new disk to the Linux machine and use "ddrescue" to capture a full image of the failing disk and save it to the new disk ( instead of cloning). We can work data recovery on this saved image.

When we take disk image, target disk's sector size is not an issue (obviously because we are not doing a sector by sector clone ).


Which is the Linux distro you are using ?. Are you booting it from the 500 GB HDD or DVD/USB ?.

Question to OP:

Did you buy a more than 2TB drive? Can you please give the model no. of the drive you purchased?

I've already done a completed Photorec recover of the faulty drive.

Is "photorec" was able to recover all important files ?.

Anshad Edavana said:

I've already done a completed Photorec recover of the faulty drive.

Is "photorec" was able to recover all important files ?.

I am not sure. I got many files back but they all had the unhelpful names of "fXXXXXXXXXX" ("f" followed by numbers). So... I'd need to sort out all the files to know what they are. I already sorted out some but the majority need to be looked at. Even then I cannot be sure if all files are recovered. I don't know all the files that were lost since there were so many.

jumanji said:

Question to OP:

Did you buy a more than 2TB drive? Can you please give the model no. of the drive you purchased?

I bought a 2TB drive. It is this one https://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/...=seagate%202TB

I think the sdc (4096 sector size/488378645 total sectors) must have become faulty after I began the ddrescue on it but then halted progress before completion.

Why did you halted "ddrescue" ?.

It might be the USB-SATA bridge which is reporting the disk as a 4096 byte sector sized. The disk may report different geometry when connected directly instead of USB-SATA bridge.

3TB hard disk used as external USB connection or internal Sata connection

I am still not sure whether a clone to the new disk will work but it will worth a try as nothing to loose here.

@Jumanji

What is your opinion ?.

Please try the below steps.

1. Connect both source and destination disk at the same time and use "fdisk -l" to identify which one is old and which one is new.

2. Assuming source disk is /dev/sdc and destination disk is /dev/sdd , type the below command.

ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sdc /dev/sdd recovery.log


This is the command options which gave me best results. The cloning process will take a long time so make sure to not abort it. I had to keep the system powering on a full day including night to successfully clone a 500 gb disk with lot of bad sectors.